It becomes obvious that governments unaccountable to the people are dangerous to the whole world when they cannot control and contain a viral epidemic. Countries and continents  are now too interconnected, people travel far too much for an infection not to spread rapidly everywhere. In our time, such governments are intolerable to the entire human race.

We are pointing an accusing finger at China, of course. But it is not only China and the other Communist countries whose governments are not accountable to the people and can all too easily spread disease and death.

To a lesser extent, but still dangerously, the Deep State, or the Administrative State, or the Swamp (aren’t they really the same thing?) of the United States does it too.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess … helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

According to a State Department briefing, the missions were carried out by the Directorate of Operational Medicine within the Bureau of Medical Services. You might think that sounds like it would be part of HHS or NIH, but the Bureau of Medical Services is actually an arm of the State Department.

The State Department is notoriously an extra noxious region of the Swamp.

The Directorate of Operational Medicine is a part of the Bureau assigned to deal with crisis response with a $250 million portfolio and a lot of employees that almost no one outside D.C. ever heard of. At least unless you remember an event at which Barack Obama honored Dr. William Walters, the head of the Directorate, for evacuating Ebola patients to the United States.

“Now, remember, the decision to move Kent back to the United States was controversial.  Some worried about bringing the disease to our shores.  But what folks like William knew was that we had to make the decisions based not on fear, but on science,” Obama said.

By “some”, Obama meant, among others, Trump, who had been a strong critic of the move.

Despite Obama’s end-zone dance, the State Department had badly botched the Ebola evacuations.

Under Bush, the CDC had prepped an evacuation aircraft for flying out contagious Americans. The Obama administration shelved the gear because of the cost, and then failed to make use of it. The evacuation process led to the same infighting between the State Department and the CDC as now.

Dr. William Walters is still on duty. In 2017, Walters was boasting of prepping more Ebola evacuations even over President Trump’s opposition to the practice. And he was once again at the wheel now.

“The question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Walters explained the decision to evacuate coronavirus patients to the United States. “And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”

Consulting President Trump was not part of the protocol even on a major national security issue.

In a Congressional briefing, Walters boasted that, “the Department executed the largest non-military evacuation of U.S. citizens in its history. The safe and efficient evacuation of 1,174 people from Wuhan, China and people onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan is a testament to the agility, proficiency, and dedication of our workforce to accomplishing our core mission – advancing the interests of the American people.”

And the triumph of the administrative state and its bureaucratic protocols over the President.

At a State Department briefing, Walters stated that, “The chief of mission, right, through the U.S. embassy, is ultimately the head of all executive branch activities.”

That is the problem. Right there.

Walters got his job in 2011. He’s a relic of the Obama era. That doesn’t mean that his politics are those of his former boss. But this is not about him. It’s about the reality that the White House doesn’t make many of the most vital decisions and doesn’t even know that they’re being made until it’s too late.

And what that means, beyond the politics of the moment, is that the people don’t decide.

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of, but that has a budget in the hundreds of millions, a small army as its disposal, and will follow whatever the protocol is.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.

All the rest is a matter of the uncontrollable, the innate qualities of the storm or the disease, and the story that the media chooses to tell about the disaster in the service of its political agenda.

Even during the dying days of impeachment, the media was forced to realize that there was more interest in the coronavirus than there was in its attacks on Trump. The unfortunate decision to evacuate infected people to this country, against President Trump’s explicit wishes, provided the media with the opportunity to combine its attacks on Trump with the coverage of the coronavirus for ratings gold.

And if the stock market goes on falling, and the economy declines, it can even pull off a narrative coup.

Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.

There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.

There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.

It’s called the Constitution.

America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.

*

Our Facebook abstract of a Teaparty article:

The common influenza viruses have symptoms worse than those of the coronavirus and a much higher mortality rate. When are people going to wake up and stop buying into the propaganda about the dangerousness of the coronavirus being spread by the irresponsible leftist media which are literally looking to cause widespread chaos? A world in chaos is the only way the Left’s globalist agenda will come to fruition and here we are accepting it. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and realize that just because a virus has an official name does not mean it is cause for mass panic and chaos.

The war in Afghanistan, launched on October 7, 2001, may be over.

The reason for it was to punish the Islamic terrorist organizations which had plotted and assisted the attack on the US a month earlier on September 11.

AP reports:

The United States signed a peace agreement with Taliban militants on Saturday [today, February 29, 2020] aimed at bringing an end to 18 years of bloodshed in Afghanistan and allowing U.S. troops to return home from America’s longest war.

Under the agreement, the U.S. would draw its forces down to 8,600 from 13,000 in the next 3-4 months, with the remaining U.S. forces withdrawing in 14 months. …

President George W. Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. …

It only took a few months [for “the coalition” in theory, which is to say the US in practice – ed] to topple the Taliban and send Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida militants scrambling across the border into Pakistan …

At which point victory was declared and American soldiers were brought home …  Wasn’t it? Weren’t they? No. Why not?

The war dragged on for years as the United States tried to establish a stable, functioning state in one of the least developed countries in the world.

Yes, the US under the leadership of President George W. Bush went on pouring blood and treasure into that benighted country to make it “a stable, functioning state”. And under the followship of Barack Obama (follow he did, not only after Bush as president but by “leading from behind” as he put it) the US military were turned into a charitable organization, forbidden to shoot unless shot at, and compelled to build schools and clinics for the pitiable “undeveloped” Afghans.

So then what happened?

The Taliban regrouped, and currently hold sway over half the country.

The U.S. spent more than $750 billion, and on all sides the war cost tens of thousands of lives lost, permanently scarred and indelibly interrupted. [Wrong choice of word, “indelibly”, AP. “Irredeemably” would be better – ed] …

How has the end been brought about? Has the Taliban been defeated?

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended the ceremony in Qatar, where the Taliban have a political office, but did not sign the agreement.

It seems the Secretary of State was reluctant to sign the “agreement”. The signature on it, for the United States, does not carry much authority.

Instead, it was signed by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

Addressing reporters after the signing ceremony, Pompeo said the U.S. is “realistic” about the peace deal it signed, but is “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation”.

He said he was still angry about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and that the U.S. will not ”squander” what its soldiers “have won through blood, sweat and tears”. He said the U.S. will do whatever is necessary for its security if the Taliban do not comply with the agreement.

Pompeo had privately told a conference of U.S. ambassadors at the State Department this week that he was going only because President Donald Trump had insisted on his participation, according to two people present.

The Taliban believe they have won the war. Are they wrong?

Dozens of Taliban members had earlier held a small victory march in Qatar in which they waved the militant group’s white flags, according to a video shared on Taliban websites. “Today is the day of victory, which has come with the help of Allah,” said Abbas Stanikzai, one of the Taliban’s lead negotiators, who joined the march. …

Last September, on short notice, [President Trump] called off what was to be a signing ceremony with the Taliban at Camp David after a series of new Taliban attacks. But he has since been supportive of the talks led by his special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad.

Under the agreement, the Taliban promise …

… the Taliban promise! …

… not to let extremists use the country as a staging ground for attacking the U.S. or its allies. But U.S. officials are loath to trust the Taliban to fulfill their obligations.

At least they are “loath to trust” the savage terrorist organization.

What will they do when the Taliban break their promise?

We expect President Trump to devise the most effective response. He has made it known that he’s reluctant to have the US engage in foreign wars that don’t directly affect US interests.

Perhaps Americans will never again have to fight a “savage war of peace”.  Or at least not in the next four years. 

Historian Niall Ferguson explains why the West IS superior:

Phillip Haney was found shot dead in his car on Friday, February 21, 2020. (See our post about it here.)

It has not yet been determined whether he committed suicide, for which no plausible reason has been suggested, or murdered, for which ample plausible reason is easily found.

What he was prepared to expose in a book he was working on about Muslim jihadis infiltrating the US government, as he indicates in this video interview published on February 4, 2020, is deeply troubling:

https://youtu.be/S1qFdiTGMxk 

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Libby Lael)

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump at the Taj Mahal

Whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

So writes the Canadian writer David Solway at PJ Media.

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous [people’s] sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

The link leads to another article of his, at American Thinker (February17, 2020), in which he gives details of the totalitarian legislation:

Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “inspectors” — that is, spies: wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families, and shut down businesses, impose prison time for contempt of court, and compel conformity via “re-education”.  …

Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression …  The bill effectively mandates that citizens address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem,” or “zeir,” or you’re done for.  …  There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59,  C-75, and C-76, that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process, and render government transparency a thing of the past.

The assault against normalcy, common sense, civil rights, and charter freedoms gives no indication of relenting.  Bill S-202, an act to amend the Criminal Code now before Parliament, would outlaw what the government misleadingly calls “Conversion Therapy” — that is, by criminalizing parents, lawyers, physicians, and church leaders who object to state-compelled hormone-drugging and genital mutilation procedures, the bill would effectively prevent minor children [who are] undergoing forced transgender operations, surgical and hormonal, from receiving the help they need. “This whole agenda to sterilize and mutilate children,” write the editors of Action4Canada, “is pure evil and in violation of … the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as a physician’s ethical commitment promising to ‘First, do no harm'”. …

Not satisfied with … conducting dodgy prosecutorial attacks on individuals whom the party wishes to intimidate, silence, or arrest, Trudeau’s Liberals are considering a motion requiring all news content–creators to procure a government license for approved content, thus controlling public access to information. …

Not content with such despotic measures, the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) proposes to identify news sites that are “accurate, trusted, and reliable” with the intent to enhance the “diversity of voices”.  Truth be told, there are precious few “accurate, trusted, and reliable” news sites in Canada. … Moreover, we know that emphasizing “diversity of voices” is equivalent to the imposition of the grievance-driven identity-group and social justice model on public broadcasting while constraining factual reporting and bridling the dissemination of genuine news.  It is … tantamount to a government monopoly on information …

All of Canada’s political parties signed on to Bill C-76, which … imposes further restrictions on third-party speech during extended election periods. …  Every political party steers to the Left, including, as noted, the Conservatives, who are essentially Liberal Lite.  Trudeau is simply the most visible embodiment and effective bellwether of the political virus infecting the country. …

He cites the case of Omar Khadr (see our post and the video here) as an example of the inverted values of the governing elite.

He characterizes the form of government as “soft totalitarianism”:

Soft totalitarianism is a considerable way from hard totalitarianism.  …

But the soft leads to the hard, and is doing so:

To say it can’t happen here … is an expression of overweening confidence and lack of historical awareness.  One does not have to think back to the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany.  A mere glance at the European Union’s unelected, bureaucratic authoritarianism, or a recognition of what the Democrat Party is demonstrably planning for the United States, should awaken us to the danger.  To be awakened, we might remark, is the opposite of being woke.  Canada stands as a vivid illustration of what would be in store for the U.S. under a Democrat administration.

It can happen here, and it is happening right now, right here, in Canada.

He continues in his PJ Media article (written on February 24, 2020 – one week after his American Thinker column):

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper [? – woke puppet?] politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations”, based on two founding peoples, the French and the English …  But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.

It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellionkooks into the classroom to terrify the children”. … An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble.

Nor, it would seem, the will. Is Justin Trudeau not the leading  destroyer of the country which he believes never had a “core identity” anyway?  

And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

What hope have the remaining good Canadians? Perhaps they could hope that President Trump will make an offer on behalf of the US to buy the remains of Canada from the Queen, at the bargain price the corpse is now worth, and resurrect the nation as Canadian North Americans, annexed to the Republic, happy, prosperous, and free.

The forced sterilization of children by tyrannical Western governments continues:

Canadian father Robert Hoogland of Surrey, British Columbia, tells how the BC Supreme Court put his 14-year-old daughter on testosterone and forbade him to even speak of her as a female.

(Taken from The Participator. Hat-tip to its editor, our British associate, Chauncey Tinker.)

Victorious Trump the Conqueror is going to India.

We took this delightful video from PowerLine.

It is ridiculous but highly complimentary to him:

https://youtu.be/neKeyexYikk 

We are commentators, not news reporters. But when we get to know about something that should be reported and is not (or has not been at the time we hear of it), we see it as essential that we try to make it known as widely as we can.

This is our Facebook abstract of a report published by Law Enforcement Today:

Philip Haney, one of our most brilliant, most dedicated comrades-in-arms, a DHS whistleblower on the Obama administration, was found dead on Friday. The indications are that he was shot to death.

Hanay is credited with helping capture more than 300 jihadists, and he was doubling down on efforts to “protect America from progressive leftists socialists and the Islamic movement”.

He blew the whistle on the Obama administration for shutting down an investigation he was leading that could have potentially stopped many Muslim terrorist attacks. Obama’s orders were to delete and discard records of Muslim terrorist activity. The top down directive to delete several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database was issued in November, 2009. Haney had said: “It infuriated many of us that the Obama administration was engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material — the actual intelligence we had been collecting for years. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.”

As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks and planned attacks, such as the one committed in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, which left 14 people dead and 22 seriously injured;  and also those committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010); Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).

The American Left, to our joy, is dashing itself to pieces on the rocks of its own nonsense.

But the biggest strongest menace will continue to advance from the Left. From the farthest Left. From Communist China. 

In addition to its inimical trade practices – which President Trump is actively combating – China uses multifarious means against us.

The johnny-come-lately to the Democratic line-up of presidential candidates, former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, shills for China. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his billions have been augmented by generous emoluments from the Chinese communist regime.

China indoctrinates Americans through our own educational institutions and undermines our scientific and technological superiority with our own inventions and discoveries.

Professor Walter Williams writes at Townhall:

Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested earlier this year on accusations that he made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about work he did for a program run by the Chinese government that seeks to lure American talent to China. He was paid $50,000 a month and up to $158,000 in living expenses for his work, which involved cultivating young teachers and students, according to court documents. According to the Department of Justice, Lieber helped China “cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security“.

It’s not just Harvard professors. Newly found court records reveal that Emory University neuroscientist Li Xiao-Jiang was fired in late 2019 after being charged with lying about his own ties to China. Li was part of the same Chinese program as Lieber. A jury found a University of California, Los Angeles, professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. Newsweek reported that he was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges. Meanwhile, NBC reported that federal prosecutors say that University of Texas professor Bo Mao attempted to steal U.S. technology by using his position as a professor to obtain access to protected circuitry and then handing it over to the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.

China is steadily building up its military power.

And even that is not all or the worst of it. China harms the world without firing a single missile. Because it is a badly governed country, it can do nothing effective about epidemics of disease that break out among its own vast population and spread over every inhabited continent – as is happening now with the coronavirus.

Communist government – cruel and oppressive though it is – is not even efficient government. Marxism, collectivism, socialism, communism – call it what you will – is too often spoken of, written about, thought of as ensuring security. At the price of freedom, yes. Given that choice, many, it is said, would choose security over freedom.

Nothing could be plainer now than that Communism does not guarantee security.

To the contrary. All it guarantees is enslavement, poverty, sorrow, sickness and mass death.